Another "could have, should have" game.

Hey Caleb, you've just defeated the dark god Tchernobog, what are you planning to do now? No silly, you're not going to Disneyworld, you're going to wait a hundred years and smack around the Cabal who worship the dark god. Apparently besides being really irate with you for destroying their god they want to bring the ol' bad boy back and that means destroying you. Thus begins Blood 2: The Chosen, the sequel to Monolith's FPS Blood, and the second game to use the Lithtech engine.

In Blood 2 you play as Caleb, the undead protagonist of the first game, or as any of the three other Chosen, fellow rebels against the Cabal. While the game plays out the same if you choose someone besides Caleb, the one liners your character cracks along with the ability to use certain weapons varies. Speaking of weaponry, Blood 2 has a wonderfully huge list of tools of destruction, ranging from the mundane 9mm pistol, to the magical flying sphere that drills into a target's head. An interesting touch is that there are actually more weapons in the game than your character can carry. You can drop weapons though and fill the empty slot with a new one. If you thought shopping for your parents was rough with all the possible decisions, wait until you try to make a decision of what weapon you want to drop so you can get the napalm gun or mini-cannon.

There's a plot to Blood 2 but it's a pretty lame one. You want to kill the head of the Cabal, Gideon. Gideon wants to kill you. Not exactly Pulitzer prize winning material but it does serve the purpose as you chase Gideon through the game, battling his minions and various bosses.

Blood 2 is powered by the Lithtech engine and shows that you don't need to have a Quake 2 or Unreal license to make a hot looking first person shooter. The levels look great, the animation on the models is top notch, and there's enough gibbage and colored lighting effects for several first person shooters. Unfortunately while from a technical standpoint the levels are good, from an aesthetic view they leave a lot to be desired.

For starters the game might take place in 2028 but the world sure looks like it's 1999, or even 1989. The vast majority of the game takes place on Earth, with levels consisting of trains (someone at Monolith obviously has a fetish for trains -- you'll play train levels repeatedly), sewer systems, and office buildings. Except for one level that takes place on a giant hovership, there is absolutely nothing that screams futuristic. On top of this is the fact that the levels themselves are fairly ho-hum. While there are a few which shine (the hovership, the cathedral, the drawbridge) most are uninteresting environments, played out in a linear fashion that include a couple find the key segments.

The biggest error made in Blood 2 has to be the complete and utter lack of horror. Remember in Unreal that section where the doors close, the lights go out, and then a minute later you got a big bad ugly on your case? Well, that thirty-second segment in Unreal has more suspense than the entire game of Blood 2. Sure, there's a couple of places with a bit of gore, but a dead body in a washer doesn't really create a mood of terror. What happened to the fantastically frightening levels of the first Blood? There were some genuinely blood-curling moments in the Shining inspired hotel of Blood or the logging camp in the north. Forget about fear in Blood 2. When you're blasting away, a 9mm in each hand, at a group of sharply dressed men armed with machine guns, you won't be thinking John Carpenter but rather John Woo.

Blood 2 proves that looks aren't everything. Sure, the Lithtech engine delivers a nice experience, and there are plenty of interesting weapons and things to kill, but in the end Blood 2 plays too much like something from before the Age of Half-Life. The puzzles are simply the locked door type in which you need to find the key or switch, the plot is pointless, and the game feels more like a game and not an experience a la Thief. Worth mentioning is also the fact that like most post Quake 2 games, multiplayer is a shaky affair. All in all Blood 2 isn't a bad game, its just not really that memorable or exciting. That's a shame because the tension of the first Blood mixed with the graphics of the second would have been a real winner.

Reviewed by Scott R. Krol.